About Thomas LaFramboise

Tom LaFramboise earned his B.S. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both degrees being in theoretical mathematics. Subsequently, he spent several years as Assistant and Associate Professor in the mathematics department at Marietta College in Marietta, OH. In 2002, Tom decided to retrain in biostatistics, earning a Masterĺs degree at the Harvard School of Public Health, which led to a postdoctoral position in cancer genomics in the laboratory of Matthew Meyerson at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT. He joined the department in August 2006.

Research

Broadly, Dr. LaFramboise is interested in developing and applying computational tools to identify molecular variants - both inherited and somatic - that contribute to cancer and related diseases in humans. His postdoctoral work centered on the statistical modeling of data from SNP microarrays to detect DNA copy number changes in tumors, and he has written a number of R software packages designed to draw biological inferences from genomic data. His group is currently developing and applying methods to mine high-dimensional data sets, with the goal of generating hypotheses regarding gene function in tumor initiation, progression, and metastasis. We then test these hypotheses in the laboratory using human cancer cells.